Scored (8 page)

Between each question, there were lined spaces for the answers.

“Wait a minute,” Imani said. “Did
you
write this?”

“Yeah.” Diego stood and slid into his leather jacket, revealing the faint traces of sweat marks under his arms. “Leave it on your desk in American history,” he said. “I’ll pick it up after class. And don’t worry, I’ll be sneaky.”

“
You’re
giving
me
homework?”

“If I like what you’ve written, I’ll be in touch.”

Diego headed to the front door, nodding to the silver-haired librarian, who said his name as if they were old pals. A few moments later, a generic factory hum from a scooter started up, then faded northward, carving the route of his journey home.

Imani was still standing at the end of the table, holding his homework assignment.

“What an assho—”

Imani never swore. It was a severe violation of impulse control. But she almost finished that sentence.

Out loud.

IMANI WOULD HAVE
liked to spend the following Saturday in Cady’s garage, handing over tools while discussing Diego’s risky proposal. It wasn’t that Cady’s advice would have been trustworthy. Her ideas were formed in the steamy jungle of emotion rather than the cool laboratory of reason. But she would have listened. Cady was a world-class listener, attentive even while soldering a circuit board.

Imani knew that her parents would not have understood. Their grasp of the world was based on an obsolete value system that was probably the root of Imani’s problems. Who else had gifted her with the dusty antique of loyalty, that “disempowering bond”?

Isiah might have understood, but his advice would be worthless. Imani knew she was beyond the machinations of
middle school fitness. She was at best in the realm of extreme subtlety. At worst, she was beginning a downward spiral that would deliver her, with mathematical finality, into her destiny of worms.

Or worse.

So with her options limited, Imani went clamming. The shores of Hogg Island were desolate early Saturday morning as she waited for the tide to recede. Frankenwhaler was beached at her side, the sun rising warm and bright over the plateau of Corona Point. She had only herself to speak to, and did so freely.

There was much to consider. The risks of a secret collaboration with Diego were obvious. Not only was there the threat of discovery, there was also the prospect of carrying around the damning secret in full view of every eyeball in Somerton. Knowingly committing an unfit act was the essence of incongruity. What if the software inferred this violation of the third element from a persistently guilty expression? Could she fool it? Or would the attempt result in her score dropping even further? What nonmilitary options were there for a 52? Or a 42?

On the other hand, the benefits of collaborating with Diego were obvious too. He was smart, as much as Imani hated to admit it, very smart. His anti-score sentiments were original and well sourced. Though she found his attitude grating, there was a good reason he was Mr. Carol’s favorite. Not that Imani derided her own gifts. She knew she wrote excellent essays, with a sharp grasp of point and counterpoint. She had excellent critical reasoning skills, as Mr. Carol himself had frequently told
her. But she also knew what she lacked: a passion for the big ideas. She could turn almost anything into an exemplary essay, but to win the Otis Scholarship, she’d need more than that. She’d need a sense of purpose. She’d need the kind of passionate opposition to the score that Diego displayed so skillfully.

As the tide receded, the damp sand began to bubble. Imani got to work, filling her mesh bag with the oversized clams her mother would turn into a thick, creamy chowder. If she’d been born twenty years earlier, perhaps Imani would have settled into a life working those shores, as her mother’s family had done for generations, before most of the commercial clam operations closed down. She paused to gaze across the channel. Sometimes she found it hard to believe that such rich surroundings could be so bereft of life, that beneath her beloved blue was a tragedy still unfolding. How had people let it happen? If Imani had a sense of purpose for anything, it was for this: the river, the islands, the ocean beyond, and the interplay of commerce and nature that she knew from her parents’ musings had once been Somerton’s backbone—before it was a trial town, before it
needed
to be a trial town. There was a time when Somerton had taken care of itself.

Imani’s clam fork stuck out of the sand where she squatted. Her bag was full, the sun was high, and there was just enough water in the river to carry her home.

Mrs. LeMonde was on her knees in the kitchen, making room on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator for a new box of night crawlers. Her faded black cargo pants had frayed irreparably at
the ankles. Her mother only bought new clothes when the old ones disintegrated.

Imani lifted her clam bag into the sink, and her mother stood to inspect the haul. Mrs. LeMonde loved nothing more than to spend all day in the kitchen with a sink full of fresh catch.

“Anyone else out there?” she asked.

“Nope.”

Stuffing her hair behind her ears, Mrs. LeMonde turned on the faucet and got to work. She looked beautiful to Imani, her auburn hair messy with waves and shot through with silver, her freckled skin crinkling around the eyes. She belonged there, in the house and at the marina, in the bait shop and in her own destiny of worms. But Imani knew that her mother’s way of life could disintegrate, like those cargo pants, at any minute. A few more recreational boaters opting for Waverly, another lobsterman calling it a day, and the marina was done for. The problem with Somerton was that it produced great fishermen, clammers, lobstermen, and boat mechanics. But no one had tended to the foundation. No one was taking care of the river itself.

“Something on your mind?” her mother asked.

“Nope.”

Her mother laughed. “Of course not. You know, I had secrets once too.”

Imani would have liked to hear those secrets someday, but not now. She had work to do. She was going to college in the fall. No matter what it took.

*  *  *

Though it galled Imani that Diego believed she had to prove her worth to him, she was willing to play along. This would not entail any attempt to be his friend, however. She would use his ideas, as he would use hers. There would be no more to it than that. She settled down on her bed and got to work.

The first three questions were easy. After a few drafts, she came up with the following answers:

So far so good, Imani thought. But when she got to question
4—How is society improved by the score?—
she spent a lot of time staring through her window. To identify how the score had improved society, you had to consider what society would be like without it. But she had never lived in that society. From her parents’ stories, she knew that it had been no picnic, that a prolonged depression had wrung out the nation and made places like Somerton almost unlivable. She knew about the high unemployment rate, and the concentration of wealth that still made her father spit fire about “the man.” It wasn’t as if the score had fixed all of those things—yet. Wealth was still highly concentrated, as the millionaire crust of Corona Point attested, but the score
was
spreading. It was becoming “ubiquitous,” to borrow a favorite term of the creepers. And it wasn’t free anymore. Somerton, Wakachee, and the handful of other trial towns had been test cases for Score Corp. In other towns, Imani knew, you had to pay for the privilege of being scored.

And people did pay, by the
millions
. That had to mean something.

Imani recalled an assignment Mr. Carol had given them earlier in the year. He frequently asked them to examine current events in order to highlight historical principles, and this
time he’d assigned the Somerton pages of WickedNews, an online clearinghouse of local news for the North Shore area. There, on the Education Forum, the parents of Somerton had been waging a debate about barring all unscored students from the school system. Mr. Carol had asked his students to uncover constitutional principles at stake, but Imani had found few.

She called up WickedNews on her cell and scanned through the debate again. The letters were full of venom, bad grammar, and personal attacks. The unscored parents, or “opt-outs,” as they preferred to be called, were vastly outnumbered, fielding only four dogs in the fight, whereas the scored letters were often signed by twenty or more parents. Though the letter writers displayed that selfishness common to parents (a selfishness that extends exactly one degree outward, to incorporate one’s own children but no one else’s), they also frequently insisted that whatever was in their child’s interest was in society’s interest too. For the most part, this amounted to the parents of the unscored fearing a surveillance state and mind control, while the parents of the scored insisted they were heralding a new age of mental health and meritocracy. There were links aplenty in support of each position.

Though Imani had never been interested in politics, it occurred to her now, as she pinged from one link to another in the no-holds-barred brawl of parental panic, that she’d been living in a bit of a bubble. Outside the confines of her own small concerns, a war of ideas was under way. After wading into those churning waters for a few hours, she was able to piece together the following answer to question 4:

Imani attached links from the
American Journal of Psychology, Business Today
, and Mr. Carol’s personal favorite, the
New York Times
. There was no shortage of counterevidence, and it intrigued her that, based on her research, she could have come up with a very different answer. But that wasn’t the deal. Besides, she knew Diego would have the counterevidence already in hand.

Imani turned the paper over and wrote as neatly as possible:

Diego wasn’t the only one who could assign homework.

AT FIRST, IMANI
was too self-conscious about the note she was carrying to worry about all the whispering; in the halls of Somerton High, people were always whispering. The note was folded in quarters and jammed into the change pocket of her jeans, where, despite the implausibility, she could not resist wondering if the eyeballs would detect it. She felt clammy and wasn’t sure whether nervousness would make her redden or go pale. Neither option was acceptable. If she was going to undertake this secret collaboration with Diego Landis, she’d have to work on managing her emotions.

The whispering grew more feverish as Imani neared her locker, and finally she noticed that much of it was directed at her. Eyes darted toward her, then away, then upward to the eyeballs.

She was being discussed.

There was only one explanation she could think of. The librarian must have ratted her out. She was someone’s grandmother, perhaps, and had mentioned it, maybe even innocently, over dinner. Imani could see the whole scene. Peas being passed while the librarian described an argument between Diego Landis, that unscored kid with the strange hair, and some mixed-race girl with caramel skin (Imani’s skin was always described by white people as caramel or cappuccino) and the most
adorable
freckles. That would be it. That would be the detail that would give her away. The librarian’s grandchild—a lowbie, no doubt—would tell his gang buddies, and, through the magic of exponential rumor dissemination, Imani’s secret collaboration with Diego would be a matter of public record within hours. Her score was ruined.